


hollow, yet blue.

by lord_pilot



Category: Team Fortress 2
Genre: AU where the RED team doesn't do so well during the robot war, Apocalypse, Blood and Gore, Body Horror, Descent into Madness, Feels, Heavy Angst, Loneliness, M/M, Major Character Injury, Mann vs. Machine, Medical Jargon, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Minor Character Death, Not gonna tell you if this ends well or not tho, Robot Feels, Robots, This one will be rather sad, Wilderness Survival, bird metaphors, did I mention blood, haha get it
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-14
Updated: 2021-01-19
Packaged: 2021-03-18 09:07:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28740756
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lord_pilot/pseuds/lord_pilot
Summary: For every person they lose, the robots seem to multiply tenfold. Eventually, what's left of the RED team is forced into hiding as Gray Mann renders most of their bases inhospitable and infested with machines, but when Medic sneaks into one of them to rescue Archimedes, he wasn't expecting to get caught in the middle of a bomb exploding. Nor was he expecting a giant robot Heavy to be waiting for him when he woke up, and nor, to be honest, for the robot to act oddly human.
Relationships: Heavy Robot/Medic (Team Fortress 2), Heavy/Medic (Team Fortress 2)
Comments: 5
Kudos: 43





	1. blut.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "...the blood of your silence." 
> 
> — Jules Laforgue // _Complaint on Certain Trying Occasions_

Beneath the odor of burning metal and scorched steel, he smells, quite strongly, _blood._

His typical life after-hours is (or _was_ ) overbooked with blood in places that achieved a practically religious state of permanence, such as crusted beneath his fingernails, dried on his forearms, or flecked on his face.

Not long ago, in the time when robots weren’t out for his blood, he used to arrange his tie neatly, gel his hair so it would remain tidy after fights, tuck his trousers meticulously into his boots‒ and after battle, walk in good posture with bloodstains all over his whitest coats.

He has long since accepted that blood is simply another feature of a soldier’s uniform. That blood is more a uniform than a uniform itself. Nowadays, he doesn’t even wear a tie‒ he has recently theorized that the color red attracts danger. The machines appear to be drawn to it like sharks to the scent of blood.

He knows what blood smells like fresh. He knows what blood smells like old. He knows what blood smells like flowing inside beating hearts. He knows what blood smells like gushing out of throbbing veins.

(Though, technically, it’s the iron in blood that gives it a metallic stench. A little bit of inhumanity running in everyone’s veins.)

Regardless, he can’t tell if the unusually strong coppery smell is from all the blood soaking his coat or if it's just the building on fire around him. Either way, he’s screaming before he opens his eyes, before he opens his mouth. Only, it’s not really a scream. More like a kind of guttural, strangled whimper, like if a scream crawled inside a vent and died choking for air.

Before he can even form coherent thoughts, he finds himself praying. For the pain to stop. For the robots to find and kill him. For the ceiling to fall down and crush him.

That is when he realizes how well and truly fucked he is. He hasn’t prayed to anyone in a long time. To stoop so low as to beg _God_... he must be knocking on death’s door; brain death must be taking hold of him already.

_Wunderbar._

(By now, after months of snatching his teamates from the jaws of death, the only soul remaining inside him is his own, and he doubts the Devil will be interested in haggling over it a second time. A shame. He is already irritated at the smell of brimstone clogging his nose.)

Eventually, his body grows tired of being on fire and settles into a pit of smouldering coals that flare up at the slightest touch. He grits his teeth, cold tears streaming down his face. The stench of blood is so thick that he swallows it like a handful of pills. When he breathes, his lungs resist the movement.

He opens his eyes, blinks away the liquid dripping from his lashes, and looks up at the burning shell of the base, smoking and on fire in several places. It’s nighttime, but the flames bathe everything in light.

He realizes his glasses are missing from his face when the world smears across his vision like an unfocused photograph. Through a gaping hole in the ceiling, the moon is a fuzzy circle in the sky, and the stars bleed into the black without clarity to sharpen them.

It’s quiet; he can’t hear anyone nearby. Nothing human, and nothing _not_ human. (He is not sure what he would have preferred if he had the choice.) A robot would have detected him by now and swiftly ended him (though he doubts any present machines lingered before the explosion). And any human inside the base would surely have been killed in the aftermath.

He finally notices the industrial steel pipe buried inside his ribs when he tries to sit up; jaws of electric teeth ravage his chest, making him violently spasm and drool like an invalid. The high-pitched noise he makes would have impressed even Scout.

Through the haze of agony and labored breathing, he digs up a miniscule scrap of dignity and manages to feel embarrassed.

Personally, he has never particularly cared when patients cried or drooled or wet their pants, from fear or pain or other reasons. As far as he was concerned, dignity is a luxury only needed by gods, and doctors. Everyone else is, unfortunately, made of solely flesh and fragile parts. After all, it isn’t the fault of cheap rubber gloves for being so easily torn.

The pipe must have impaled him when the explosion tore apart the building.

It was mid-afternoon. He was walking as quietly as possible into the front entrance, feeling relieved at the lack of robots anywhere, making eye contact with the glowing blue eyes of a robot with a bomb strapped to its back, and then passing out as the world exploded in front of him.

He does not even want to think of what became of Archimedes, alone in his cage where he was very reluctantly abandoned in a swift retreat some days ago after their latest base of operations was discovered. So he doesn’t think about it.

He can tell without looking that the pipe missed his ribs and is perforating his right lung, middle lobe, the source of his breathing troubles. The wound is staunched, but blood is still seeping into a puddle that tells him another hour of sleeping would have made it a permanent state.

He supposes he’s lucky to have awoken to begin with. He has no idea how the blast didn’t kill him outright. It's fortunate he was firm with Heavy and insisted on travelling alone.

Puncture wounds are always tricky (not to mention he’s more used to working with smaller objects such as bullets and knives). To pull such a large and deeply-embedded object out of his body would induce fatal hemorrhaging within seconds, and he’s already lost so much blood...

Yes, he is alone, and there is no one around to save him. That is something he must do himself. He can't say he's not entirely unused to this feeling, and certainly doesn’t plan to start being helpless now. If he’s going to do this, he needs a way to stop the bleeding as quickly as he can. He needs to _stand up._

But after a few tries, his legs only twitch uselessly when he tries to move them, evidently in shock‒ possibly hypovolemic, possibly obstructive. Neither types will help him bleed out any slower.

He sweats and strains, now trying to roll onto his side without using a single abdominal muscle. The fog in his brain from blood loss and pain diminishes his energy. The fire inside his body turns to sparks that scrape with sharp fingers against his ribcage.

He cannot move. He can barely breathe. The moon is gone now, but the stars still bleed into the black. At this point, he will be lucky to see daybreak.

“ _Fick mich..._ ” he hisses and lays back down again, his arms spread, his fingers relaxing. He is dangerously tired, but to sleep now would be to lie in his grave without digging it. He supposes his old home, though in ruins, is as good of a tomb as any.

_At least I told you I loved you before we parted, mein liebster freund,_ he thinks, and it comforts him somewhat. To know that although Misha will miss him, they’ve said their farewells, even if they never meant for them to be final. He hopes, at the very least, that the sweet Russian man never finds his body. He never meant for Misha to know what blood smells like old.

He closes his eyes, and the stench of iron is the fire of his body burning down.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope I'm not boring y'all with the stuffy imagery. Going on and on about nothing is just how I naturally write.
> 
> Oh, uh, and no, Medic ain't dead just yet. Even I wouldn't kill the main character in the first chapter :^)
> 
> // Chapter Theme: [The Departure](https://youtu.be/8R5Ppb9wqjY) by Max Richter


	2. herz.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "And who here is not buried in another person's heart?"
> 
> — Richard Jackson // _Heartwall_

It was quiet.

That is to say, _Misha_ was quiet, which wasn’t altogether unusual. The man’s preferred language did not consist of spoken words, but rather a brushing of hands, an arm on a shoulder, a lean against another in a shared space.

Medic was usually the one who talked at length, about God and neolithic surgical techniques and combining human and avian DNA and if one could rearrange the lobes of the brain like building blocks, and Misha was the one who listened. Medic knew his dear friend didn’t understand every foreign word and medical term, but where they didn’t understand each other in some languages, they invented new ones.

Often they sat together in their free time, engaged in some quiet activity, bodies touching in some way. It was a nice change of pace after spending the day disemboweling their foes and getting disemboweled right back. They were tired old men, after all (though they were neither quite so old nor quite so tired). They would live forever, when the time came for it. For now, they didn’t need to say a single word.

However, one such day ended up different from the rest. Like a genetic mutation that proved to be a species's saving grace when it came to continuous survival. Medic has come to find that a person could evolve every single day, if they were in love; perhaps that is what Nietzsche truly meant by _Übermensch._

In the corner, Archimedes preened on a desk with the occasional coo, feathers wet with fresh blood. The two of them were sitting on a couch within the base reading, shoulders touching, except Misha wasn’t reading. He only stared down at the pages of his book and did not turn them. Medic could tell by the way his shoulders were hunched that he wanted to say something, and the air thickened with something unsaid.

It could have been his injury bothering him. Misha’s entire head was wrapped in bandages so that only his eyes and nose were visible, making him resemble a very pitiful spy.

By now, Medic knew quite well how to treat burns inflicted by the enemy Pyro, but the masked fiend had managed to melt poor Misha’s skin into the periosteum layer of his skull. The skin under the bandages was still raw, the stench of scorched flesh still nestled inside Medic’s nasal cavity like an animal asleep in its lair.

(After hearing Misha’s screams, Medic, of course, wasted no time in rearranging the coil of the Pyro’s intestines with his übersaw, but the damage was done. Even now, there was still blood under his fingernails; when he wasn’t careful, he left faint impressions on the pages of his book.)

“Are you alright, _liebling?_ ” Medic asked. Misha’s blue eyes flickered towards him in a movement resembling a ripple of water. It wasn’t every day when Medic called him something less suggestive of friendship and more suggestive of something _more,_ but those days were certainly growing in number, their shared languages increasing in vocabulary.

“Ah, y-yes,” he replied after a moment, his voice somewhat muffled. Medic frowned and did not accept the weak answer.

“Is your face still hurting? If you wish, I can give you a painkiller.”

He didn’t remember when he regained the ability to care about another human’s pain, but he supposed he didn’t mind, if it was Misha.

“Ha,” Misha chuckled, and Medic imagined him smiling under his bandages. “Pain-killer. Only Doctor’s medicine has funny name like that. As if drug had minigun and killed pain with bullets.”

“That is a most apt comparison,” Medic smiled wryly. “However, you didn’t answer the question.”

At this, Misha hesitated.

“No, no pain in my face. Doctor is good at his job,” he mumbled, looking down at his book again. Medic raised an eyebrow.

“Aheh, you sound unsure,” he said, slightly teasing. At the desk, Archimedes fluttered his wings, settling into sleep.

“Pain,” Misha began. “This pain... cannot be killed by painkiller. This pain is...”

_So he was in pain..?_

Misha gestured helplessly, but Medic waited patiently for Misha to gather his words.

“ _...bulletproof,_ ” he said finally.

Slightly taken aback, Medic closed his book to focus his full attention on his friend.

“ _Ich verstehe nicht,_ ” he admitted, but his heart beating louder clearly knew something his mind didn’t. Misha sighed, frustrated at his inability to communicate something clearly profound.

“You... are only man I know who can outsmart bullet,” he said solemnly, rubbing the pages of his book. “You play with men like they are children’s dolls and you make them into killing machines. When there is blood on your face, you _smile,_ like‒ like adorable cat that has eaten the mouse _._ And when you are not near me, my heart...”

Misha said a word in Russian. He said it again in Ukrainian, in Polish, in Bulgarian, and in other languages Medic didn’t recognize but still understood.

“...it is broken,” Misha finished. The visible parts of his face were as reddened as his uniform, but his eyes were clear and blue, and avoiding Medic’s. “This heart is _bulletproof,_ but breaks when you... a-are not there to heal it. When you are not nearby.”

Stunned, Medic didn’t say anything when Misha took his hand and held it against his large chest, fingers splayed. Misha’s heartbeat was quick and strong; one could practically hear the beat of an überheart even without physical contact.

“ _You,_ ” Misha mumbled, “are my pain-killer.”

After a moment, Medic began to laugh. The earnestness in Misha’s eyes immediately collapsed.

“What? What is funny?”

His voice was the most insecure that Medic has ever heard. It made him want to croon and pat his poor, suffering friend on the cheek.

“Ah, Mikhail...” Medic smiled softly, removing his hand from his friend’s chest. “You often say that you are not very good at speaking English, but I disagree. You’ve shown me that language is far more than simply the words that one says.”

Feeling bold, he reached for Misha’s chin and turned the man’s face towards him, brushing with a thumb under his eyes in a silent request to look back at him. Blue met blue like familiar friends.

“So many words just to say you love me! _Dummkopf,”_ he cackled affectionately. “You read too much Pushkin, Zhukovsky, whatever. Perhaps if you read less, your large head wouldn’t be so full of things that you could summarize with much fewer words.”

Yes, the man’s preferred language did not consist of spoken words, but Medic of course did not actually mind when Misha decided to speak at length. It was akin to listening to the voice of a soft-spoken bird who sometimes fell into a talkative mood.

“Ever since I meet you, I read the same poetry again and again,” Misha admitted, sounding a little embarrassed. Medic sighed and shook his head. The other man looked at him questioningly, his chin still in Medic’s grasp. He could feel the warmth of the man’s skin through the linen.

“These _verdammen_ bandages...” he cursed wryly, rubbing his thumb over the soft white material where Misha’s lips were hidden underneath. “Perhaps I might have kissed you if they weren’t in the way.”

At that, Misha’s eyes went flustered and wide as they did whenever Medic said something particularly forward. It was always amusing to witness.

Suddenly, with a hand on Medic’s knee, Misha leaned forward to press his nose and jaw against Medic’s forehead. Curious, the doctor held his breath when Misha breathed in slowly as if to smell him. Linen rubbed softly against his brow, a warm breath ghosting against his face and fogging his glasses.

(They were _so, so_ close. It was always a marvel to be reminded of just how _big_ Misha truly was, all of his strength and body mass very evident when pressed against Medic’s side, practically lying on top of him. The Russian man could easily crush him in a fight, but the hand on Medic’s knee was impossibly gentle.)

When Misha didn’t move for a few moments, Medic lowered his eyes and inhaled his friend’s musk, smelling gun oil, clay soap, and faintly, a familiar iron. He could see thin tracks of blood on Misha’s neck that he’d neglected to wash away; apparently he wasn’t the only one with persistent blood troubles.

Then, Misha pulled back, his eyes bashful. Medic wished he could see what the rest of his face looked like.

“...was that a kiss?” Medic grinned, showing his teeth. The bandages had prevented Misha’s lips from moving, but he understood the gesture.

“ _Da,_ ” the Russian man mumbled. “A _kunik._ Is called ‘Eskimo kiss’ here, I think. The snow people in the east, they do this when only the eyes and nose are uncovered, to say hello. Or to say... _I love you._ ”

“Fascinating!” Medic exclaimed. He had never heard of such a thing.

He didn’t hesitate when he put his hands on the larger man's shoulders and leaned forward to press his own nose against Misha’s forehead, nuzzling him with much more roughness than he'd received.

“ _Moy geniy, moy angel, moy drug,_ ” the other man whispered, his arms finding Medic’s waist and circling around them.

“ _Ich liebe dich auch,_ Mikhail,” he whispered back. Their words filled the air, overpowering even the miasma of blood that haunted him like a ghost. Some things could never be gotten rid of.

ᨏ

He is blind.

That is to say, nothing happens when he opens his eyes, so it certainly _feels_ like it. Pure darkness is just one of those things that weigh heavily on him. Pleasant dreams can only keep one asleep for so long.

It dawns on him that he’s inside his lab, somehow. The concrete walls are particularly good at imprisoning a certain sickly-sweet organ scent regardless if there is any gore present (of which was slightly offset by a disgusted Engineer via scented candles he often lit), but it’s notably faint. _He_ feels faint.

He groans, and the sound is the only one in the world.

The cold, flat board he’s lying on makes him think of the examination table, something he himself has had little opportunity to lie down on. He’s been informed many times that it was the farthest thing from comfortable, and now he understands. He makes a note to apologize profusely to his team.

 _If_ he manages to make it out of here alive.

He remembers the events of yesterday with a violent spasm, as if he stuck his finger inside an active electrical socket. As if he was abruptly awoken from a dream.

The _bomb,_ the _robots,_ the _agony..._

With caution, he brings his hands to his chest, searching for the steel pipe perforating his lung. Interestingly, there is nothing but layers of linen wrapped around him, much like the kind he used to wrap Misha’s head all those months ago. His coat is gone, leaving him quite cold.

Maybe it really _was_ just a dream... he feels no more agony (or any strong sensations, for that matter) but rather a detached numbness that reminds him of the affects of morphine. As if his body is suspended in a warm bath.

If the abrupt _beep_ of a machine behind him almost gives him a heart attack, the sudden low roar deep within the base where the generator is located almost kills him then and there.

 _“WARNING: EMERGENCY POWER ACTIVATED,”_ announces an artificial woman’s voice over the damaged speakers. She sounds as if she’s seen better days. He could empathize.

The lab floods with red light, bathing everything in a nightmarish crimson glow like a photographer's darkroom, and for the first time, he gets to see the damage his lab had undertaken from the bomb.

For one thing, the farthest wing looked two seconds from collapse, the walls bent in half and exposing skeletons of other rooms beyond. Various machinery littering the room were in varying states of disarray, shelves overturned, papers scattered, jars of things both dead and recently dead smashed to the ground.

Months and months of his life's work ruined, essentially. Not that it mattered much anymore.

His expensive grand mahogany desk, though dusty with rubble, seemed untouched, at least. The ceiling itself looked relatively sturdy and not two seconds from collapse, which bode well for him.

A single bird cage stood in the corner. He could not see Archimedes inside where he had left his pet a few days ago. Yet, the door of the cage was curiously closed.

This doesn’t stop the worry from squeezing his heart with two fists, nor the apprehension from settling into his weary limbs, the notion that something is _very, very_ wrong here. He did not merely hallucinate dying in a puddle of his own blood while the moon watched from above. It happened, and yet here he is, still quite alive, two floors below from where he started.

Well, the only thing that matters now is that Archimedes’s corpse isn't here. He could make sense of it all later.

He manages to sit up with a groan, moving his limbs by the strings of his tendons as his muscles proved too weak to fully manipulate. He feels a sharp pinch, and looks down with a start to discover an IV taped to his arm, a visible needle pushed deeply inside him.

If he was apprehensive then, it is nothing compared to the terror that he suddenly feels, the adrenaline that fights with teeth against whatever drug is coursing through his body, slowing him down, making him weak.

It’s not until he hastily sets about removing it does he notice how poorly-applied this IV actually is. The tape is crooked, the tubing in tangles, the injection port cap half-open, and the cherry on top‒ the IV was not even inserted into a vein.

He laughs out loud, running a hand over his greasy hair, his growing stubble. His breathing comes easier (though the damage in his lungs becomes more and more apparent with every rattling breath). When his hands stop shaking, he single-handedly removes the IV with practiced ease and lifts the catheter to his nose.

 _Morphine,_ just as he’d suspected. Other than the bittersweet narcotic, he doesn’t smell poison of any kind, but he suspects that anyone trying to kill him simply could have left him upstairs to bleed to death.

He _is_ still missing a dangerous amount of blood, if his dizziness and shallow breathing is anything to go by, but he’s far less confused than he should be. No doubt the enlarged animal heart inside him is at work; its affects outside of facilitating invulnerability was something he’s always meant to study further.

He wonders just how many other doors in his life are now locked because he didn't open them in time.

He also wonders what kind of person would hang around a secret base of operations that was just blown up, someone with enough knowledge to drag him downstairs to a secret lab whilst keeping him _alive_ (no easy feat with the amount of blood he was losing)...

...just to apply the IV like a medical apprentice fresh out of _gymnasium_. And giving morphine to an _anemic_ person _,_ of all things... but perhaps there simply wasn’t blood on hand.

He looks around at his jars of blood reserve in puddles on the floor and laughs again. He physically gasps when air exits a gaping crevasse in his lung and wetly blows against the back of his ribs. He resolves to not laugh ever again.

Still, he is uneasy. Even more so when he hears the distant footsteps down the hall.

Only, they aren’t footsteps.

The sound is more like a metal cart being pushed across the hallway, except much faster, much heavier, and with only a single wheel.

He is standing up before he knows it and staggering across the slippery floor to his desk where he kept an old bonesaw in a drawer. His body protests, refusing to allow what little blood he still has to flow as fast as he desired, but he persists until his fingers close numbly around a metal handle, the teeth of the bonesaw glinting crimson in the dark.

Soon, he’s forced to lean against the desk as his limbs stop supporting his entire weight, and he pants as if he just did laps around the base. The sound of the wheel gets louder until it grows to a halt in the doorway mere meters away.

He looks up into the glowing blue eyes of a robot Medic, and its looming body is bathed in red.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is twice as long as the last one but yeet
> 
> Chapter Notes:  
> -A "kunik" is an Eskimo kiss, basically. Whereas an "Eskimo kiss" is a Western thing where you rub noses with someone, the original Inuit gesture mostly involves putting your nose and upper lip on someone's cheek/forehead and smelling them. It can be romantic, platonic, or just a greeting depending on the culture. I don't know how far this gesture extends beyond Alaska, but I wouldn't be surprised if Eastern Russian natives do it too.
> 
> -Gymnasium is the name of a type of German school that you'd go to before University basically, if you had high grades and wanted to become a doctor or a scientist, etc. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. I've barely set foot outside of my own state in the US.
> 
> -"Moy Geniy, Moy Angel, Moy Drug" is actually the name of one of Tchaikovsky's earliest surviving works and is Russian for "my genius, my angel, my friend," which I think would fit what Heavy thinks of Medic very well. It's not very well-known, but it's short and sweet. I'll link it below. Also, in a letter to a friend/lover, Zhukovsky (a Russian poet) similarly said "moy drug, khranitel'-angel moy" which means "my friend, my guardian angel" which I thought was worth mentioning.
> 
> -Also, apparently Tchaikovsky was gay af. Go figure :^)
> 
> // Chapter Theme: [Moy Geniy, Moy Angel, Moy Drug](https://youtu.be/keXUtGimKIs) by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky


End file.
